Coast to Coast (12 page)

(“Cold slaw”, among the condiments, is the most interesting entry here. It is a salad of grated cabbage, and it was introduced to America by the Dutch of New Amsterdam. They called it
koolsla
—
kool
‚
cabbage;
sla
,
salad—which became in English “cole-slaw”; but simple Americans, to this day, insist on further Anglicizing it as Mr. Kendalle did on board the
Monarch.)

Such memories of the grand old days of the river colour the thoughts of the modern Mississippi boatman, giving him, paradoxically, an air of rooted traditionalism far more pervasive than you will find among his colleagues on the imperial Rhine. He lives in a silent, self-sufficient,
introspective world, and as the months and years go by, and the tangled banks float past, so slowly he merges his identity with the Mississippi's water. He becomes, indeed, like the boats and barges, a part of the river. Having seen a little of this process for myself, I left my towboat one evening at dusk, and the motor-boat dropped me at a disused landing-stage in Arkansas, near a bridge and a lonely highway. I said good-bye to my friends, shouldered my baggage, and set off up a dusty track over the levee; and at the top of the embankment I looked back. There was the tow still streaming by, her engines beating, her searchlight flickering and flashing and feeling the banks, like a restless finger; as if she could no more stop, or pause in her progress, than the river currents themselves, swirling under the piers of the bridge.

A
little of this dusty allure, this scent of river mud and magnolia, seeps into the purlieus of Washington, the capital of the United States; for that symbolic metropolis lies on the shore of the Potomac River, and if you scratch very hard, explore very thoroughly, evade as many hostesses as possible and skip all possible functions, you may still find a boatyard or two beside the water, see the blunt tugs nosing their way through the winter ice, or listen to the badinage of longshoremen down among the derricks.

It would be wild to suggest, though, that Washington is in any way a brawny capital. It ought to be, heaven knows, when you think of the power exuding from its offices, the hulking frontier energies it represents, the vast resources it commands, or the generations of burly go-getters who have made Capitol Hill what it is. But in fact, like all artificial cities, it is ham-strung by self-consciousness. It is one of your planned capitals, and they are nearly always depressing (unless, as in Paris, the immensities of style are relieved by a filigree of ancient tumble). The boulevards of Washington seem endless indeed. The cherry trees of Washington would afforest an exotic mountain chain. The monuments of Washington, each two or three miles from the next, are luminous but seldom comforting. The venerable little suburb called Georgetown, the Chelsea of this city, is charming but dauntingly impeccable, its neat unpretentious facades masking, as often as not, air-conditioning units of breathless expense, and the kind of housewives who prop enormous books about Aztec sculpture on the open music-stands of grand pianos. Washington is not a large place: from any of its
vantage points you may see how bravely the surrounding countryside resists its urban pressures. It has, however, understandable pretensions to grandeur, and with all its flags and crests and emblems, its slogans and its statuary, its busts of dead heroes, its vast government buildings and its Presidential presence, it sometimes reminds me of a more gracious but scarcely less ritualistic Moscow.

With this difference, in particular: that while Moscow has to it an air of limitless continuity, stretching back far beyond the commissars to the dread gilded Czars of old, the character of Washington recognizably shifts each time a new administration takes office. There is an eighteenth-century quality to this facet of the American political system. In comes the new President, and with him arrives an entirely new ruling caste, a Holland House coterie, complete with all its experts and advisers, its fashionable hostesses and modish mistresses, its favoured court jesters, its hair styles, dogmas and transient taboos. Eisenhower's Washington was full of amiable bumble-heads, staunch double-chinned chapel-goers, self-made company presidents with Germanic heads and grass-root principles. Mamie Eisenhower's comfortable dresses and motherly manners somehow set the tone of the place, and there was a benign unsubtle flavour to the city's affairs, like a Norman Rockwell painting. Into this ambience, which grew vaguer and unhappier each year, and more harried by criticisms, Jack Kennedy, his wife and his young men swept like a keen cold wind out of the prairie. The new President spoke of New Frontiers, and somehow in the first months of his administration there was a real sense of the fire, fun and purpose that must have characterized the great days of the West. Not long after the inauguration I met a Washington acquaintance of mine looking distinctly pallid, and asked him what the trouble was. “I guess it's these New Frontiers,” he said. “I'm getting too old for the Injun country.”

For Kennedy's Washington is not an easy place, nor does it conform in the least to our archetypal image of America, complacent and uncomprehending. It is a ruthless, ambitious, clever, conceited, handsome image that the President has created for his capital. Washington today is full of brilliant youngish men, a little intolerant of criticism perhaps, and not always very decisive, but intensely aware of how flabby a figure of wry fun their country has recently been cutting. They see themselves, I suppose, as successors to Roosevelt's Brains Trust, and they are very far indeed from the traditional sweaty manipulators of Washington affairs, the shirt-sleeved senators and the smoky political agents. The professionals are still there, of course, and in the long run they will probably stay on top: but no visitor to Washington in 1962 can fail to be
impressed by the acid distinction of Kennedy's associates, the earnest verve of the lawyers, newspapermen, academics and even artists who now set the pace of the city. They have already demonstrated their various incapacities, and experienced their ups and downs of fortune, but there can be few contemporary capitals, all the same, richer in plain brain-power: and conversely there cannot be many that feel so denuded of the homelier political qualities—those old practices of baby-kissing and plump flattery, Irish sympathy and old-school skullduggery, that somehow take the sting out of public affairs, and reduce them to humanity. Stafford Cripps might feel at home in Washington today, or even Harold Macmillan: but a Churchill or an Ernest Bevin, I feel, would be like a dolphin out of water.

Clean through the texture of Washington this new fibre runs, for this is almost exclusively a city of Government, and it is the Executive, not the Legislature, that dictates its style. Just outside the city stands the gaunt grim Pentagon, secretive and mammoth, and less awful bureaux of authority, from the Mint to the National Geographical Society, dominate every quarter of the place. Nearly every citizen works for the Government, and very often his wife does too. Ask the taxi-drivers, and half of them will tell you that they are studying for the Civil Service examination. Even the hotel chambermaid is often employed part-time at the U.S. Treasury. Washington is not a complete, full-blooded city. Its theatre is vestigial, its university lies out of sight, its music is mostly amateur. Its galleries and museums are splendid, but its shops are feeble. Its waxworks is a pale imitation of Madame Tussauds, its Episcopalian Cathedral is decorous in sham Gothic. It has virtually no industry, and even its tourism, though it must attract millions of visitors each year, seems wan and half-hearted. When the winter blizzards hit the Atlantic cities, Washington is much the slowest to clear the snow from its streets. It does not feel a city in the round. It is more gently mannered than most American towns, and by the nature of things it accepts eccentrics and outsiders with aplomb: but it is short of earthiness, open-throated humour, boisterous local pride, the clanging of engines or the blaring of night-clubs. Its tastes are caustic rather than genial. When the design was published of a monolithic national memorial to Roosevelt, all jagged slabs and angles, it was a Washington wit who dubbed it “Instant Stonehenge”.

It also has a skeleton in its cupboard, which perhaps helps to mute its manner. The District of Columbia, which is in effect Washington, is voteless, under the terms of its foundation (except that it may now participate in Presidential elections). It is not only unrepresented in Congress;
its own municipal affairs are governed not by an elected council, but by a Congressional committee. This is, as everyone agrees, an anachronism, and from time to time measures are introduced to Congress to abolish it. There is, however, one tricky stumbling-block. Washington now has a negro majority, and giving the city the vote would not only increase black power in the Republic at large, but would probably give the national capital a negro mayor and administration. The very notion sends a shudder down the southern spine, and seems only a step towards that ultimate degradation, a negro in the White House. Washington, largely for diplomatic reasons, has no colour bar in its restaurants, hotels and theatres: but if you think racial prejudice is dead in this apex of the democracies, talk to the estate agents, and see to what lengths they will go to keep the more exclusive suburbs free of blacks, Jews or indeterminate aliens (even the British Embassy, I am told, was recently unable to buy property in one area because of the racial company the Queen keeps). It is one of the more awkward facts of American life, and of American diplomacy, that the capital of the United States stands in black man's country, invested, at the end of every boulevard, by the shades of bigotry. The Nigerian Ambassador may go where he wishes in Washington: but if he drives his Cadillac a few miles to the south, down the Virginia highway, he will be unable to buy a cup of coffee in the roadside coffee-shop. What is more, each year Washington becomes more negroid, further complicating a labyrinthine issue. Each year the white people retreat farther into the embattled suburbs. Each year the downtown stores seem to cater more exclusively for negro ladies. Each year the black fringes of the city, the drab brownstone houses and shambled stores, corrode still further the pompous city centre, rotting away many an old precept and many a rooted conviction. Before many decades have passed Washington will find that it has, to borrow a prognosis for the world's future given me by a cheerful Jamaican novelist, “bred out brown”.

But paradoxically here is the glory of the place, the grand old truth that still seeps through the squalor and the prejudice, the snobbery and the slime: that if one city in the world really does hold out a promise of ultimate decency, of fraternity among all peoples, it is still this dull old entity upon the Potomac. Here you may still feel, when the wind is right, the faith of the founding fathers, and may still sometimes glimpse, reflected in classical colonnade or florid portrait, the potential dignity of America. In Washington the Supreme Court of the United States still reassures you that, for all the petty graft of American life, this remains a fief of the Law. In Washington you may still see the President of the
United States personally questioned, at his weekly Press conference, by the representatives of his people. In Washington, if ever you escape the awful parties and the dreary social arbiters, you may still feel this great Republic groping for the good, and somehow still pursuing, come slump come rocketry, the honourable mean between arrogance and irresponsibility.

And if, one summer night, you stroll alone through the city after a mellowing dinner, and see its famous monuments all about, the great floodlit dome of the Capitol, the gleaming obelisk of Washington's memorial, the White House demure and domestic behind its railings, craggy old Lincoln dim-lit in his marble chair—if ever you wander through the capital in such a mood, Jefferson in your head and Chesapeake prawns in your belly, then I defy you to resist the magic of the American experiment, or evade its ever-noble pathos.

I
f Washington is the prickly appendix of the South, its forked tail is Florida. Many parts of this well-known State are characteristic of the agricultural South; but many parts (it seems almost silly to add) are not. One place that is decidedly alien in spirit to the southern temperament is Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, a street of nightmarish hotels, each more feverishly grotesque than the last, pink and saffron and blue, with glass fronts and marble pillars, indoor fountains, marvellously uniformed porters, and a constant stream of wild visitors, like a flood of some barbarous beverage, forever moving in and out of their doors. Another uncharacteristic southern region is the great swamp of the Florida Everglades, steamy and impenetrable, alive with spoonbills and panthers and alligators, inhabited only by Seminole Indians whose colourful costumes you may sometimes glimpse along a soggy track through the bogs. But the rarest southern sport of them all lies at the very tip of Florida, where the Gulf of Mexico joins the Atlantic; for Key West, the southernmost place in the country, is the most cheerfully un-American city in the mainland United States.

We were chased by brutal tropical storms when we drove down to Key West, and the skies were full of beautiful angry clouds. The way runs out of Miami, across a corner of the Everglades, and on to the Overseas Highway, the wonderful structure (built originally for a railway line) that links the scattered islands of the Florida Keys. For a hundred miles or more you drive along this flying road, now high above
the sea, now descending to some small mangrove island, cluttered with fishing stations and restaurants. All around you stretches the water, the Gulf on one side, the Atlantic on the other, infinitely blue, dotted with little shrubby islets, with sometimes a powerful motor-boat, tarpon rods a-cocked, streaming away to the fishing grounds. This is a scene that Ernest Hemingway loved and described, and it is infused with a great empty blue melancholy. Soon it will lose its last traces of real loneliness‚ for on almost all the islands houses and hotels are being built; but there is still a powerfully remote feeling about the highway, as if it is taking you far out to sea to Rockall or St. Helena—at least in the hot and steamy summer months, before the Jamaica shirts arrive. Indeed, Key West is built on an island, a coral island, commanding the Gulf and the entrance to the Caribbean, and it has retained to this day an insular sense of isolation and foreignness.

The rain caught up with us as we entered the town, and with the wind bending the palm trees there was a feeling of desolation to the approach. There have been repeated attempts to make Key West a booming holiday resort (despite a fundamental lack of spiritual accord with, say, Weston-super-Mare). During the New Deal they built promenades and piers, and “workers of the Federal Writers’ Project” produced a guide book; but the flagstones of Roosevelt Boulevard are crumbling a little, and grass is growing between the cracks; the many visitors who go to Key West in the winter and spring evidently enjoy its persistent air of slightly piratical independence. We sensed this air at once, even in the teeming rain. Everywhere men were lazing about with no shirts on, and women, their hair streaming with the wet, were doing their shopping in swimsuits. In the middle of one busy street an old man was leaning over, very slowly, to pick up a waterlogged coconut and shake it by his aged ear. The place was hot and steamy, but enlivened with a brassy foreign gaiety.

In this atmosphere intrigue has always flourished. The independence of Cuba (only ninety miles away) was hatched in Key West, and many an enemy of Fidel Castro’s régime has escaped trembling or furious to these quays. Some of the great buccaneers of history visited the island, and undoubtedly buried their treasure among the keys. Wreckers first made the island rich, and there are accounts of the dazzling fleet of boats, sail crammed on sail, which regularly left Key West
en
masse
when news of a wreck arrived. One story tells of a Key West parson who sighted a ship in distress through the open door of his church while in the middle of a sermon; still declaiming piously, he edged his way towards the door, making sure (by the hypnotic spell of his message) that
he had a head start on his congregation before shouting the traditional “Wreck ashore!” and sprinting for the quayside. In the prohibition era Key West was a smugglers’ delight, for they could sail their fast launches through a myriad of little islands, hiding among coral reefs and mangrove islets, and emerging at night to slip through with their contraband from Cuba. There is still a pleasantly conspiratorial manner to Key West, as if it is forever plotting
coups
d’état,
arranging invasions of Cuba, or succouring secret agents. A man who claimed, obscurely, to be a spy working for Scotland Yard warned me in our hotel there: “Be on your guard: you never know who
or
what
you’re talking to in Key West!”—advice which, I confess, sent a certain cold chill of apprehension down my spine. From here the submarines of the U.S. Navy sustain the edicts of the Monroe Doctrine, and often and again, on these patched quays, you will sniff a breath of tainted air from Guatemala, or hear the Panamanian nationalists grumbling.

Such cloak-and-dagger sympathies are partly fostered by the climate. Key West is the only truly tropical town in the mainland United States; there is never frost there. It is well below the 25th parallel—about on a line with Calcutta—and the streets are lavish with tropical foliage (hibiscus and bouganvillea, orange poincianas, allamanda, banyan, tamarind, frangipani, mango, guava, coconuts, bananas and bignonia). There are orchards of tropical fruits to eat, and splendid fish from the Gulf (tarpon, amberjack, barracuda, sailfish, marlin, redfish, jewfish, kingfish, chowder and grunts): those who know say that of the 600 varieties of fish found in the waters round about, more than 100 are edible.

If you wander among the coiled ropes and huts and boxes of the harbour front, you may see the boats of the shrimping fleet, which sail each day to the vast shrimping beds of the Gulf of Mexico. Or you may see turtles, shipped in by schooner from the Cayman Islands, in great storage tanks on the quay, wallowing and groping round and round, and occasionally coughing throatily. On the water big brown pelicans swim ponderously and snobbishly about, and cormorants brood on the tops of posts.

Through this environment, as you may suppose, the people of Key West move light-heartedly. It is a little city dedicated to easy living. At night along Duval Street a colourful crowd saunters and sips and gossips. Sailors from the submarine base spill out of the innumerable bars, swopping bawdy with the girls and camming into burlesque houses that offer a variety of not wildly wicked entertainment. In little open-fronted cafés you can while the hours away listening to Cuban music on the radio, and eating pungent Cuban sandwiches. Patio restaurants, in the courtyards of old houses, offer immensely long and varied meals. You
can eat turtle soup (if you can bear the memory of those coughing captives); turtle steak, rather like veal; or turtleburgers. You can sip good wines and talk to artists, profane seamen, baffled tourists from Indiana, idlers, scientists and collectors of shells. Or you can wander through the streets in the half-light, enclosed in the sticky warmth of the atmosphere. Nearly all the houses are wooden, and a little dilapidated (some of them were built by the ship’s carpenters of sailing vessels). They are encrusted with balconies, unpainted, cool, and shuttered. Unlikely trees surround them, and the dusty streets are lined with handsome palms. Now and then a giggle steals out from a shadowy corner, or a tipsy sailor curses as he trips over the pavement, or there is a snatch of some voluble foreign tongue from an alley-way; or you suddenly notice on the porch of a house, rigid as a figure from an Egyptian tomb, an old lady on a rocking-chair, staring at you disapprovingly; or a knot of big negroes on a street corner, smoking cigars, suddenly breaks into deep guffaws of laughter. There is a smell of exotic fruits and tobacco; and the breath of a hot wind stirring the palms; and high above it all are the winking red lights of the Navy’s radio masts.

An association, but scarcely a mixing, of races contributes to all this seductive potpourri. About a quarter of the people of Key West are Cubans, who speak Spanish, eat funny Cuban food, dubiously watch Fidelist programmes from Cuba on their television sets, and go to cockfights on Sunday evenings. There are also the “conches”. These are people of English origin who came to Key West by way of the Bahamas. They are simple folk, tall, bronzed and good-looking, and they talk in a strong Cockney dialect. It is odd to ask a question of a raw-boned Caribbean fisherman, wearing the briefest of shorts and the gaudiest of shirts, and be answered in a voice direct from the platform of a London bus. Some of these sunburnt out-of-doors men sound such thorough Londoners that they might well be pushing barrows down Whitechapel Road, or hawking avocadoes in Oxford Street. The Key West negroes also talk Cockney, of a modified kind, softened by tradewinds and sweetened by sapodilla, for they too came from the Bahamas. They look quite different, in bearing and in feature, from the ordinary American negro, and feel far from the petty degradations of the South. I was told repeatedly in Key West that both Negroes and Conches preserved “certain old Cockney customs”, a phrase instinct with street cries and dray-horses, music-halls and cabs and King Edward VII; but my knowledge of old Cockney customs is limited, and try though I could, I could find no ebony Pearly Queens, nor hear the tinkle of a barrel-organ down any palm-fringed alley.

We had an agreeable if exasperating stay in Key West. Our hotel, enjoying an out-of-season rest, was dominated by a spirit of gentle procrastination. It was huge and grandiose, built by the railway mogul, Henry Flagler, who constructed the original bridges of the Overseas Highway (at a cost of some 700 lives, many lost in a hurricane) and once ran a train service all the way to Key West. Its vaulted halls were generally empty, but for a couple of dark-eyed page-boys glued to the television set in the lobby, and it took a very long time (with much ringing of bells, indignant chivvying, and exchanges of mild national insults) for the tea to arrive. Once while we were there a wedding reception was held in the hotel. The bride was small, perky, birdlike and bright; the bridegroom long and gauche and taciturn. Their guests ranged from brilliantly uniformed officials to hoary lobster fishermen in slouch hats. There were innumerable dark girls in dressy frocks, very high heels, and hats with veils, and they wandered in pairs throughout the grounds, arm in arm, loudly chattering and eating cream slices. There was a splendid profusion of food, apparently available to all comers, and the festivities were joyous and prolonged.

At other times gentlemen would buttonhole me in the lobby with dark questions. Was I looking for rare fish? Had I spoken to Mr. Alvark? Would I be interested in some unique stamps from the Cayman Islands, brought in by turtle schooners? Was it right, what the papers were saying about the price of gold? Did I realize that a deputation from Equador was arriving in Key West the next day? What did the British Government think about labour restrictions in Peru? They most of them had a wild gleam in their eye, and having said their queer bit, shuffled away like disappointed saboteurs. Key West is full of such suspicions of secrecy.

But through it all there seeps the comforting philosophy of
mañana.
The city is full of people with nothing much to do, but a talent for lounging gracefully in doorways. If you stand on the waterfront on a sunny morning, you will soon find other idlers wandering to your side to stare at the water with you. Every quayside fisherman has his audience. Every swimming pelican finds someone to exchange cockeyed glances with. Out at sea the warships steal silently by, and a few lazy birds flutter overhead, and somewhere in the distance there is the muffled chug of a fishing boat. Slow and old is the island city of Key West; also surreptitious, bland and turtle-like.

We left it with regret, and drove away through Georgia and Louisiana and into Texas, until we passed the invisible boundary, between Dallas and Fort Worth, and were in the West.